American Justice

America is supposed to be the land of law and order, at least according to my public school education. A more accurate description of America would be the land of privilege and subjugation. If you’re part of the state you are privileged and able to skirt or outright ignore the law. Everybody else is subjugated to the state’s will at the point of a gun. No more prefect example of this exists than the police office at the University of California Davis who pepper sprayed a peaceful student and was found innocent of all wrongdoing. But this is America, we either go big or go home. Merely clearing the officer of charges wasn’t enough of a disregard for law and order, he had to be given a reward because people were mean to him after he acted like a complete asshole:

Former UC Davis officer John Pike, famous for casually pepper spraying a group of students in the face during a 2011 protest, was awarded a $38,000 settlement for psychiatric injuries for the way he was treated afterwards. Pike, who was eventually fired, filed a workers compensation claim this summer.

It takes balls to pepper spray an innocent student, be cleared of wrongdoing, get fired, and demand workers compensation. In any just society Mr. Pike would be sharing the same fate as any random Joe off of the street would face for pepper spraying another person without reason. Instead he’s given $38,000 as compensation because people were mean to him.

Is there any wonder why I hold no regard for the justice system in this country?

Decentralized Security

Centralized systems are traditionally fragile. Universal healthcare systems tend to have supply issues that lead to rationing. Highway systems managed by the state tend to be under construction for good portions of the year (at least here in Minnesota) with nothing obvious to show for it. And centralized security systems tend to be easily bypassed. While the world seems doomed to continue down the path to centralization at least some people are noticing the need for decentralization:

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

Allowing the populace to arm themselves is one of the more effective solutions for decentralizing security. All of the “blood in the streets” and “shootouts at high noon” that were predicted by gun control advocates have never arisen. In fact no area that as loosed its prohibitions against carrying firearms has experienced an increase in violent crime. The logical conclusion is that removing those prohibitions isn’t dangerous for the overall population. It also creates a great deal of uncertainty for violent person because they cannot know for sure who is and isn’t armed.

Bruce Schneier often talks about whether or not plots can be developed around security systems. It’s very difficult for a violent person to build a plot around random bag checks because of their randomness. But it is easy to develop a plot around modern police protection. For starters, police response times aren’t instantaneous. If prohibitions against carrying firearms exist and a violent person’s goal is to kill people he knows that he will have several minutes until the police arrive. Several minutes is a lot of time when we’re talking about mass murder. In addition to having several minutes of free reign a violent person also has a decent idea of the tactics used by the police.

Both of these things go away when prohibitions against carrying firearms are lifted. Since a person with a firearm can be anywhere response times are not guaranteed to be in minutes. Likewise, most people who carry a firearm have no received any standardized training, so the tactics used will be less predictable.

It’s much more difficult to design a plot around an armed population than a centralized armed force. Centralization is one of the key things exploited by practitioners of fourth generation warfare, which is a tactic that relies on decentralized forces to attack centralized forces. The more centralized a system is the more fragile it becomes. In many countries the police have a virtual monopoly on force. Those countries have an extremely fragile security system that can be exploited by decentralized forces. It’s nice to see at least one member of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) acknowledge this fact and I hope others will over time.

Why I Have No Time for Arguments in Favor of Prohibiting Criminals from Obtaining Firearms

One of the gun control community’s rallying cries is preventing criminals from obtaining firearms. I have very little time for this argument. It’s not that I want violent people to have a means of inflicting violence but, as Zero Hedge points out, the fact that we’re all criminals:

As James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:

Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”

If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?

As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

The number of crimes that exist in this country is so absurdly high that the word criminal effectively has no meaning. Felon is another word that has no real meaning. There are so many crimes that qualify as felonies today that most of us unknowingly violate approximately three of them every day. To say that all criminals or felons should be prohibited from owning firearms is the same as saying everybody should be prohibited from owning firearms. Under the current legal system of this country we’re all criminals. That’s something you should be thinking about the next time a gun control advocate starts arguing that we need background checks for all firearm transfers.

IsoHunt Shutdown

I have some sad news to report. One of the better torrent sites, IsoHunt, has shuttered its doors:

isoHunt, a search engine for BitTorrent files founded more than a decade ago, has agreed today to shut down all its operations worldwide. The company, founded by Canadian Gary Fung, has also accepted a judgment that it must pay the movie studios that sued it $110 million.

It’s not clear how much of that the studios will actually be able to collect. According to a chunk of court transcript cited by Techdirt, the movie studios’ lawyers estimated that Fung and his company had only “two million dollars to $4 million, $5 million at the most” that they could possibly pay.

Fung gave up his long legal fight just weeks from having to defend his site in federal court; a jury trial was scheduled to start on November 5 in a Los Angeles federal court. Earlier court rulings had already determined that Fung was liable for “inducing” copyright infringement, so the court trial would have largely been about damage control. The MPAA had stated studio lawyers would have sought as much as $600 million had the case gone to trial.

Most of you know my feelings towards intellectual property. On top of finding it morally reprehensible, I have also witnessed the writing on the wall and it shows that intellectual property is dying. It’s impossible to maintain a monopoly on ideas when ideas can be spread around the world instantly thanks to the wonderful global network known as the Internet. Hell, this victory over IsoHunt is meaningless because there are hundreds of alternative torrent sites you can download movies and music from.

The only outcome of this fiasco is that people looking to download files via BitTorrent have to spend a few minutes to find another site. In other words, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) spend, in all likelihood, millions of dollars on lawyers to achieve nothing of importance. If nothing demonstrates the slow death of intellectual property that should.

Minneapolis Police Unhappy with Gun Control… When it Applies to Them

Officers of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) are throwing a fit because the National Football League (NFL) prohibits anybody who isn’t an on-duty office from carrying a firearm into its stadiums. This policy means off-duty police officers must suffer the same treatment as us lowly serfs and view football games unarmed. Needless to say, they’re unhappy that they’re not being treated as privileged individuals:

The letter went out Sept. 11, 2013, telling all team owners and presidents that firearms are strictly prohibited within NFL facilities.

The crackdown on firearms concerns Minneapolis Police Federation President John Delmonico. He believes a call for off-duty officers to give up their weapons at the gate violates an officer’s rights, as determined by state law.

The Minneapolis Police Federation sites state law, Chapter 624, which gives police officers full police powers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In other words, they should be allowed to carry their weapons in any public place in the city.

“State law governs the facts that we can carry our guns off-duty in any public facility and any facility in the city of Minneapolis, which encompasses the dome,” Minneapolis Police Federation’s John Delmonico said.

I might be motivated to give a couple of fucks if the officers were arguing in favor of carry permit holders as well. But they’re not. The officers are just pissed off because they believe their badge should bestow them with special privileges. What’s the point of having the badge if it doesn’t allow one to break laws and rules without consequences?

Since the NFL is a private organization they should be able to make whatever rules it desires, right? Many libertarians have pointed out that the NFL should be able to declare what people can and cannot do on its property. I wouldn’t consider NFL stadiums private property. Stadiums are almost always financed with tax dollars. In my book receiving tax money makes me a part owner and I should be able to declare or ignore whatever rules I damn well please. If you want to be private property then you should have to pay for your facility yourself.

Of course this issue is unimportant to me, other than to demonstrate the fact that police want special privileges, because I don’t go to NFL games.

Economic Hitman Tactics on an Individual Level

The New York Federal Reserve released some interesting numbers recently. Of the numbers the one I found most interesting was the amount of outstanding student debt in this country:

Over the last eight years, aggregate educational debt outstanding has almost tripled, rising to nearly $1 trillion and becoming the largest consumer liability after mortgages. Was this dramatic increase attributable to more borrowers, or more debt per borrower? Both, as it turns out, in almost equal measure: The number of student loan borrowers and the amount each borrower owes have both risen 70 percent since 2004.

$1 trillion of student debt? Oi. This got me thinking about a book I read several years ago title Confessions of an Economic Hitman. The premise of the book is that the United States sends economic hitmen to developing nations. Loans are promises to the governments of those countries for major infrastructure projects. The catch is the loans are written to look reasonable but designed in such a way that the country is never able to pay it back. When a country accepts one of these loans they are forever indebted to the United States, which will come back later and demand raw materials or land in exchange for outstanding debt.

Students loans have some similarities to economic hitman loans. While student loans appear to be reasonable on the surface they are often so high that many college students can’t afford to pay them back. Instead they’re stuck paying the interest for the remainder of their lives. The state could effectively tax an entire population of students twice: once in the forms of income, sales, use, etc. taxes and once in the form of interest on outstanding debt. I’m beginning to wonder if the whole purpose behind student loans is to create an entire generation of debt slaves. There’s no way the United States government set up a system that hands out $1 trillion to students out of the goodness of its heart (since it has neither goodness or a heart).

Compounding Mistakes

It’s no secret that healthcare.gov, the primary website for the Affordable Care Act, has been less than satisfactory. People are having a difficult time signing up for their mandatory insurance policies, which will eventually put them at risk of being fined. What is the planned remedy for this problem? Hiring Verizon to unfuck the website:

An informed source in the telecommunications industry said Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions division has been asked by the Department of Health and Human Services to improve the performance of the HealthCare.gov site, which is a key component of the Affordable Care Act. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made official.

I’m sure this will go over swimmingly:

A rudimentary URL hack may have exposed texting data for tens of millions of Verizon customers, according to a new report from security researcher Prvsec. The vulnerability was reportedly fixed in September, a month after Prvsec privately disclosed it to the carrier, but before it was addressed it allowed attackers to see who Verizon users texted and when, provided they had a subscriber-level login to the carrier’s website.

Verizon is obviously the best choice to develop a secure website that people will be entering their personal information into.

The Beauty of Radical Rebellion

Going back through my blog will show the slow transition I have made over the years from statist libertarianism to anarchism without adjectives. Between those two points exists a number of philosophical changes. From constitutional libertarianism I transitions to anarcho-capitalism and from there I transitioned to market anarchism. Now I don’t really want adjectives. I fully admit that I don’t know what is best for everybody but I want people to free to pursue their desires. Spontaneous order will decide what works and what doesn’t.

This transition has lead to another change. Previously I would oppose rebellious groups based on their end goals. I had very little respect for anarcho-communists because I opposed communism. The Industrial Workers of the World, a radical anarcho-syndicalist union, was and evil organization in my eyes because it supported property destruction and sabotage. Now my point of view is quite a bit different. The mere act of radical rebellion is beautiful to me. While I don’t agree with many groups I find myself caring less about a group’s endgame and more about the simple fact that they’re radicals in an a state of rebellion. In other words I don’t really care what color your flag is so long as it has some black on it.

An example of this is the street artists Banksy. Banksy is a famous street artist who is currently hanging out in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg is pretty upset about this fact and has promised to bring the full psychopathic force against Banksy. What makes Banksy’s situation even more interesting is that his status as a famous street artists actually causes his graffiti to increase the value of a building:

I think it’s pretty clear in libertarian/propertarian terms that graffiti is in fact a crime. And it’s slightly less clear that Banksy’s schtick can be infuriatingly self-satisfied.

Interestingly, according to this lawyer’s website, the severity of the punishment for this sort of vandalism in New York depends on the economic level of damage one has done.

But Banksy-izing your property in fact, in the current art market, increases the value, so who knows how this will all pan out in either law or political philosophy if Gotham’s mayor can catch a guy whose secret identity is better protected than the Batman’s.

Back in my statist libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism days I would have decried Banksy’s actions. Today I don’t really care. Hell, I find Banksy’s art to be great. While I won’t go so far as to give the act of spray painting graffiti my blessing, I also won’t condemn the act. Furthermore, anybody who pisses off Bloomberg has to be doing something right.

With all of this said, I still have my own morals. The non-aggression principle is still something I live by. My ultimate rule in life is: don’t be a dick. I realize that my morals are not your morals and I don’t demand that you seek my blessing. However, if you want to discuss your acts of rebellion I’m more than happy to listen. So long as you’re doing something radical you’re far more interesting than everybody else.

Bad Science Leads to Bad Results

I’m sure you’ve seen the stories floating around that say scientists of proven that Oreo cookies are just as addictive as cocaine. At first this story gave me hope. I’ve eaten Oreo cookies but have never become addicted to them. If the research was correct that would indicate I could do cocaine without getting addicted. I admit, there are times when caffeine isn’t enough to keep me awake and it would be nice to know a nonaddictive, strong alternative exists for those times when I absolutely must stay awake. Sadly my hopes have been dashed. As it turns out, the research was bupkis:

Fox News reported that a “College study finds Oreo cookies are as addictive as drugs,” Forbes explained “Why Your Brain Treats Oreos Like a Drug,” and a ton of other sites ran with the story as well.

Here’s how the experiment, which has not been peer reviewed and has not been presented yet, went down. Mice were placed in a maze, with one end holding an Oreo and the other end holding a rice cake. The mice, without fail, decided to eat the Oreo over the rice cake, proving once and for all that mice like cookies better than tasteless discs with a styrofoamy texture.

“Just like humans, rats don’t seem to get much pleasure out of eating them,” one of the researchers said in a press release, the same press release that says “Connecticut College students and a professor of neuroscience have found ‘America’s favorite cookie’ is just as addictive as cocaine.”

Bad science leads to bad results. Granted, this story set off my bullshit detector right away. Because of my suspicious nature I assumed that the research was performed by an anti-obesity group looking to demonize popular junk foods or by a competitor to Oreo cookies (probably from a company that offers healthier alternatives). As gun control groups have taught us, the results you want can be obtained so long as you right the criteria properly. But it turns out that this research wasn’t the result of some anti-obesity group or an Oreo competitor (that we know of), it was the result of a bad experiment. All the experiment demonstrated was that mice don’t care for rice cakes. I don’t blame them, I find them to be flavorless and unfilling as well.

Unfortunately, I’ll almost certainly see claims that Oreo cookies are as addictive as cocaine on Facebook for weeks to come. Incorrect information seems to disseminate faster than correct information. That’s probably because correct information is seldom makes for as good of a story as incorrect information.